I’m not. The level squish won’t fix all the things you think it will. Just like the two stat squishes and item level squish haven’t fixed anything.
You said: You can reduce time to level without reducing # of levels
I said: That’s a terrible idea that will make content unplayable exactly the way it was before the levelling revamp when you spent 30 minutes per zone.
You said: “The level squish won’t change that.”
It’s like you’re not even trying to understand what you’re reading, you’ve just got a random complaint button you push everytime someone makes a post.
Where have they said that the level squish will reduce the amount of time for leveling?
I actually agree, if they give the world and leveling experience a complete overhaul, then I’ll be alright with it. But I highly doubt they would do something like this, considering they mainly like to focus on end-game content, and rush doing it as well.
The only thing I can see is the numbers getting squished down, which is something that I’m against.
Uh? What? You said they could speed up leveling. I said they could do that without squishing.
Just a reminder that you talked about speeding up leveling first.
Then you turned around and said they would slow down leveling. You can’t even keep track of the things you’ve said in this thread.
You’re accusing me of the things you said. Turn off your projector and try again.
I don’t think you guys understand the issue here or even what level syncing would accomplish. The plan is to cut the level cap in half, but then double EXP required for each level so the time spent balances out. You might be wondering what this accomplishes then. New players to the game are intimidated by the idea of having to gain 120+ levels to get to where their friends are. 60 levels sounds way more manageable, even though technically the same amount of time will be spent on leveling. It also gives them a bit more freedom to put multiple expansions into level brackets.
Back when the level cap was still 80, Blizz revealed that 70% of new players didn’t make it past level 10. I’d be interested in seeing if that’s changed, but I’m betting they still lose most people at that point. If they can’t keep people hooked past the starting zone, then the total number of levels doesn’t really matter.
Not to mention each expansion comes with a level boost to put you at the start of the expansion.
You mean like they already have? You can pick TBC or WotLK then pick Cata or MoP. They’ll probably make it so you can pick between WoD or Legion sometime soon.
If you are max level before a squish, you will be max level after a squish. They are not taking anything away from you.
If the USA switches to metric, you won’t be a different height. The measurement used just changes.
2 Likes
if everything scales in to you in the level squish say bye bye to xmog runs you wont be able to solo any dungeon.
If the engine for games like Everquest and Everquest 2 can process giant numbers I have no doubt the wow engine could as well.
Those two sentences mean the same thing. Speed up levelling (reduce time to level) without squishing (reducing # of levels). You said that.
Yes. Because you stated that it would take the exact same amount of time. Which is wrong.
Is that what you think I’m saying here? Is your comprehension that poor?
I’m making fun of you for suggesting speeding up levelling without a squish. That’s what they did since Wrath. That’s what made levelling so awful in the first place that Blizzard had to publicly admit “Levelling is broken.”
Literally nothing about this says to slow anything down. That would be dumb. I said that speeding up levelling without changing how levelling works is a terrible idea. Because it already “broke” the game once. That’s what the squish is for. Not just to run a “divide by 2” algorithm on levels, but to change how many zones you have to go through to hit max level.
Ok, let’s try to explain the squish a way you’ll understand. First, forget about levels. Let’s talk zones to max level. If it take 20 hours to hit max, but you play through 40 zones in that time, your play experience will SUCK. Because you’re spending 30 minutes per zone. That’s not enough time to introduce a zone, the major threat it’s facing, and have the character progress through the story to a resolution. This is how levelling worked pre-7.3.5. You’d start a zone, outlevel it during the intro quests, and move on. It was awful. If it instead took 15 hours and you played through 6 or 7 zones, that’s much better pacing. More players may play past level 10 if the gameplay there was in any way interesting or coherent.
The #1 factor for a good levelling game is going to be the pacing, not of the numerical levels, but of the STORY. Now, WoW’s levelling story is a little piecemeal. It’s not a single, coherent narrative like some games. It’s not supposed to be. That why it was called “WORLD of Warcraft” and not “Warcraft 4”. WoW is more like an anthology, where each zone is its own separate story. Moreseo vanilla. Expansion zones are more like… a series of disjointed introductions that flow together into a single cohesive narrative at end-level. This is an important distinction.
In order to make a good levelling experience, you need good story pacing. And in order to do that, you need to control two factors:
-story quality
-# of stories
If you’re levelling through poor storytelling, then you have a bad game. If levelling is an endless conveyor belt of random story fragments, you have a VERY bad game.
Time to max level isn’t as important, really. Personally, I think it takes too long right now. The advertised game at any given point is the current expansion, not open world levelling. Levelling should capture new players’ attention and teach them the game mechanics and their classes. That’s how long it should take, period. Levelling in Classic IS the game. Levelling in BfA is the tutorial and plot setting. IMO, If the game needs boosts, then levelling is still broken.
This is why I’ve argued that the #1 thing the level squish should do is remove expansions from the levelling experience. Expansions fail both controls for storytelling:
-they are poor quality stories in the context of levelling because they aren’t full, proper stories. As I said above, they are introductions only. And you never get to the main story of an expansion while levelling through it.
-there are a LOT of expansions, and a new one every 2 years. This most certainly qualifies as an “endless conveyor belt of random story fragments”.
So what does a good levelling game for WoW look like?
It looks like levelling through Vanilla zones and then heading into the current expansion. Or levelling through vanilla and ONE expansion and then into the current expansion.
Now that we’ve built a good levelling system form the ground up, what does that format mean for the level cap?
It means either you artificially spread vanilla zones out to 120 simply because that’s where we are now, or it means you drop level cap to either 60 or 70. The former is a lot more work. The latter is easier to do and is more nostalgic. It also just so happens to coincide with how spells are currently spread out. As I pointed out above, your class gets almost all its spells by level 60 already. It’s also better “ding!” pacing for a shortened levelling experience that is designed to be an introduction and tutorial for new players or players playing a new class.
This isn’t just “durr, teh level squish fix teh gaem!” This is a redesign of why and how levelling operates that just so happens to involve dropping level cap. And there’s supporting evidence for this change already. Professions are already separated and ignore old expansion content while levelling. They’ve already tested removing expansions from the levelling path by making parallel brackets for 60-80 and 80-90. And those two changes are the most popular changes I can ever remember being made to the game. People just seem to LOVE not having to play through old expansions in the levelling process.
This is absolutely not the point of a level squish. That’s such a TINY return on the huge investment it would be to do a “divide by 2” squish on the current system.
1 Like
No. You said that. I said that squishing wouldn’t change the speed to level to the cap. You’re the one who said they were going to speed up leveling. You keep lying about what I said so you can keep up with your smug superiority complex.
And I said that if they were going to adjust the speed of leveling (which I highly doubt they’re going to do), then they could do that more easily without squishing. Then you started making fun of me because you didn’t have anything constructive to respond with.
I can comprehend just fine, it’s not my fault you keep changing your story.
If they speed up leveling with the squish, it will be the exact same as speeding up leveling without the squish, just with different numbers at the end. You’re the one acting like this squish will solve every problem with leveling when it’s just a lame band-aid fix.
Then post squish you’d be spending the exact same amount of time per zone to get to the cap.
The time to level is absolutely important. You can’t just ignore it because it’s inconvenient.
They’re never going to do this. This is just another example of people putting way too many hopes and dreams into the squish when there is zero evidence whatsoever that the squish will do anything other than change the total number of levels.
The only thing we know for sure about the squish is that it will reduce the total number of levels. Anything else is pure conjecture with nothing to back it up and you know it.
They could make it faster than it is right now it they actually wanted to. Not sure cutting the number of lvls in half is also going to cut the time it takes in half.
For the sake of argument, let’s say 15 levels takes 50,000 experience to complete. Post-squish, if 5 levels also takes 50,000 experience to complete, and the rate of experience gain is unchanged, our situation has not been improved by the squish. You think squish will result in the leveling process getting faster because Ion told you so (and he’s never been wrong about anything…). The gaps between talents - where players actually get to make choices and not just mindlessly learn ability ranks - currently happen every 15 levels. Even if leveling time were cut in half along with the squish - which probably isn’t happening thanks to scaling - gaps between talent choices would still exist. Conversely, player choice for Classic WoW talent points comes with every single level after level 10. That is a gapless system.
Speeding up the interval at which we gain abilities doesn’t solve our problems, either. We do not get ability ranks every other level as it is, and some of the abilities we do get are crap that plays into systems which no longer exist. For example, hunters still learn Feed Pet at level 13 even though we haven’t been required to feed our pets for years. It’s vestigial junk taking up space for something that might actually be useful, like getting Feign Death before level 38. It’d also be nice to get something very useful like Misdirection before stuff that is kinda crap like Flare rather than four levels after it. Abilities need a revamp more than they need a squish.
And the squish doesn’t address the progression systems of the last two expansions, which aren’t character level-dependent. Nor does it address what happens when we move beyond expansions with those types of systems. There is no choice at all in Legion now that they nerfed artifacts into the ground. It’s just scaling weaponry with some of the important bits baked into the class. There will be no choice at all left in the azerite system once BFA winds down. This creates progression dead zones.
1 Like
That. That is what you said.
You… You JUST SAID you didn’t say this!
Ok, timeline break down time.
- You said it would take the same amount of time to reach cap, like you do in every single level squish thread, even though it’s been pointed out that you’re wrong in ever single level squish thread.
- I said you were wrong and the only concrete thing we’ve been told is that a squish would reduce levelling time. (source: Ion during the Q&A where he introduced the level squish concept initially)
- You said, “If they reduce the time to get to the cap, they could do that without a squish”.
- I mocked you because that’s a dumb idea and is what they did from at least Wrath through to Legion and that’s why levelling became “broken” in the first place.
No changes at all.
- Level cap good if done as part of a comprehensive revamp.
- Ion said level squish = shorter levelling time.
- Shortening levelling time without a squish is a bad idea.
Same time per zone * fewer zones = Oh, hey! Less time to hit max level!
This from the guy who keeps responding with the same “level time won’t change!” when that’s the ONE THING we know about the squish.
Wrong. Like, how have you still not understood: the first thing Ion said about the squish was that it would reduce levelling time. Yeah, it’s speculation. But it’s also the natural conclusion of the rest of the changes they’ve made, specifically changes to how professions work and the fact that they’ve already made some expansions redundant for levelling.
Everything you say about the squish is speculation, too. Except mine is supported by facts and yours contradicts them.
Also, the ever-increasing level cap is the reason we’ve had number, stat, and ilvl squishes. Because while level increases linearly, those things increase exponentially. So if you want to stop having to do squishes every expansion, you have to STOP INCREASING THE CAP. Otherwise the question won’t be whether there’s a squish, just which set of numbers they’re targeting this time.
1 Like
I have asked you twice, and yet, you have said nothing.
Where has it been said that the level squish is also going to reduce the amount of time to get from 1 to max?
I’ve mentioned it multiple times. Ion, in a Q&A, before the poll was released, said that they’d been debating a level squish pretty seriously in-house. The very first thing he said was that it would take less time to hit cap. Not sure which one, might take some looking up. Taliesin covered that clip twice, so check his vids on the level squish?
I have not heard Ion mentioning anything about the level squish would reduce the amount of time that it would take from 1 to Cap.
And honestly, they could also reduce the amount of time to level from 1 to cap without the level squish. But honestly, it isn’t about how long it takes to level, because that isn’t the problem. The actual problem is how bad the level experience is. How awful leveling feels, a level squish isn’t going to make it feel any better. Not unless they give leveling a complete overhaul, and also do some changes to the zones again.
Instead of a squish they could just let all races start at level at level 20 like the allied races. If the next xpac goes to 130, then bump up to 30 as a starting point. If players wants to start at level 1, and go the distance then let them have that option also.
Leveling in Retail is completely pointless now anyway. They may as well remove levels entirely.